Essex County Hall of Records in Newark is treasure for historians

NEWARK -- One of the artifacts brought out from behind the heavy, six-inch doors of a basement vault in Newark is an oil portrait of Arthur T. Vanderbilt, New Jersey’s chief justice from 1948-1957.

Still stored there are original letters from the Olmsted Brothers, famed park designers, and even original art-deco door knockers, shaped as human figures and once gripped by Newark visitors to an "Egyptian-style" courthouse razed in 1907.

Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerOld Essex County bonds were found in the Essex County Hall of Records in Newark.
The black-doored vaults along a darkened corridor inside the Essex County Hall of Records in Newark provide a home for historical documents and assorted artifacts that were once scattered in offices throughout the county.

The items — many of them portals into the lives of the Essex County of old — have been digitally captured within the past year, making for quite a picture show in the offices of Frank J. DelGaudio, the county risk manager in charge of records modernization.

"We can just pull up anything back to 1682," DelGaudio said.

As he flipped through hundreds of images on his office computer, up came one black-and-white photo of a line of lounge seats facing a wall of windows at the long-gone Essex Mountain Sanitorium in Verona. "It looks so peaceful, those steamer chairs," he said.

Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerThis portrait of Arthur Vanderbuilt was also found in the Essex County Hall of Records.Up pops another, this time hinting at the attire of the day. "The guy in the boiler room is in a suit," DelGuadio said.

As for the documents, many were painstakingly preserved in folders decades ago by Charles Cummings, the beloved Newark historian who died in 2005. The collection includes a deed receipt given by President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to a Cornelius Vermule for two tracts of land in Essex County, said Chris Taylor, an Essex County systems analyst who assumed the role of tracker of old ledgers and the sort.

There are letters, dated 1899, from the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Mass., the famed landscape architects, asking Essex for a survey of the marsh at "Weequahic Reservation."

"If convenient, Mr. Olmsted would like to see you at Bloomfield Avenue about nine o’clock next Tuesday," it reads, signed in script by "The Olmsted Brothers."

In a stack of documents are five small $200 bonds issued by Mechanic National Bank of Newark, promising to pay the bearer on "the first day of July 1871" $7 in interest. They were never cashed, but Taylor said he had assurances from the county treasurer that they no longer had any value.

There are cases of glass photo plates whose images of Paris and Chicago raise only question marks to their origin. A hand press, used to imprint the county’s official seal on stationary, reveals a round, bead-edged seal with flowing lines reading "BOARD OF CHOSEN FREEHOLDERS."

"The current one has a lion on it," Taylor says.

The oldest surviving binder with the minutes of freeholder board meetings dates to 1789.

Amanda Brown/The Star-LedgerOld ledgers found in the vaults.In one of the vaults, there is an array of bound volumes. One is labeled "EXPIRATION BOOK," from the Essex County Penitentiary and dated 1891. The "expiration" doesn’t refer to deaths, but rather the dates jail terms expired. Artifacts of a more recent variety include a large Rolodex, whose many contacts include Joseph Bubba, a state senator for 16 years until his primary defeat to Republican Sen. Norman Robertson in 1997.

After Taylor spent years tracking down the items, Large Doc Solutions of Rahway was awarded an $886,900 contract to do the digital conversion work. The project was funded through a series of PARIS (Public Archives and Records Infrastructure Support) grants from the state.

Just weeks ago, Essex County received another $116,000 PARIS grant which will fund the move of historic materials from the freeholders and other county entities to the climate- and sprinkler-controlled environment at the soon-to-open LeRoy F. Smith Jr. Public Safety Building next to the Hall of Records.

So far, it’s not clear how the public will access the newly digitized historical materials. "We’re still working that out," said Deborah Davis Ford, clerk of the freeholder board.

All the renewed focus on history has spread to the hallway outside the ornate freeholder chambers. A week ago, large, framed prints of everything from the "Egyptian-style" courthouse to the old Bee Hive Department Store — once out of sight in a conference room — have been brought out into public view.

A series of maps, in this case from the state’s archives rather than Essex County’s, will be displayed in the halls to show the progression of Essex’s many boundary changes.

Even though the portrait of Vanderbilt was brought out, its fate remains uncertain. Administrator Joyce Wilson Harley said it was taken upstairs to the conference room of Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo Jr.

Why was it brought out? Because the portrait bears a striking resemblance to the county’s treasurer, Harley said.